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The year in corrections

An embarrassing mistake for the Toronto Star this year was referring to Diana, on the 20th anniversary of her death, as the Princess of Whales in a cutline from a photo gallery of her visit to Toronto in 1991, seen above. (Toronto Star / Bernard Weil)

Unfortunately, only in the Star in 2017.

Indeed, those were two of the more embarrassing errors published in the Star in the past 12 months.

“Oh no. We spelled Canada wrong?!?!?! This is beyond embarrassing,” said a newsroom editor who spotted the mistake in a newspaper photo cutline about celebrations for Canada’s 150 birthday celebrations. To add insult to injury, the cutline also mistakenly referred to Canada’s 100th birthday. To quote another editor who weighed in on this sesquicentennial screw-up, “That’s just sad.”

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A couple of months later, as the world marked the 20th anniversary of the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales, a photo cutline in an online photo gallery of Diana’s 1991 visit to Toronto referred instead to the Princess of Whales. To add insult to injury, another photo caption mixed up her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.

“I can’t believe it but you’ve captioned one of the pictures as the Princess of Whales — should be Wales,” a reader wrote. “Also one of the photos is captioned as Prince Harry when it’s Prince William.

“You guys need to fact check and spell check your articles.”

In fact, all content published in the Star is fact-checked, spell-checked and double-checked. Still, sadly, mistakes happen. And dumb typos happen too. As I have said in past, the most careful of journalists can make these silly slips that look so obvious to all once printed but are somehow missed by several sets of eyes in the writing and editing process. Believe me, I know: you can look at the same sentence six times and just not see the glaring error until it is too late.

While all involved abhor such errors, I am happy to say that Star readers often see the lighter side of things. Take for instance another reader’s comment on the Princess of Whales: “Princess of Whales? Did she hang with SpongeBob? Did she cruise around with Aquaman? Maybe Scuba Steve? Hopefully all with trident in hand. Goes without saying — it’s Wales.”

All joking aside, accuracy and corrections are serious business around here. In 2017, (as of Dec. 29) the Star published 1,179 corrections to remedy errors in print and online content — 360 for the newspaper and 819 to fix website mistakes. That is a 12 per cent increase from last year’s total of 1,049 (406 for errors in the newspaper and 643 to fix online mistakes.)

To be honest, I believe the number of online corrections is likely higher, however. A large amount of digital content is published and corrected around the clock in real time and I know that deadline pressures mean that these online errors and fixes don’t always get reported to the public editor’s office to be captured in our corrections spreadsheet, as is required. We are looking at ways to improve this process.

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As in past years, factual errors ran the gamut from mistakes about geography and history to science and math. Stories in the Star misnamed the Torngat Mountains, located on the Labrador Peninsula; mixed up Toronto’s first mayor, William Lyon Mackenzie with his grandson, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s 10th prime minister, and told you that the pistil is the male part of a flower. As stated in the correction, it is the female part.

We bungled the name of a car shown in a photo — it was a Bentley, not a Bugatti; and mixed up macaroons with the French meringue delicacy, macarons, in a food feature faux pas. Then there was the letter writer who stated that former Alaska governor Sarah Palin once said she could see Russia from her front door. In fact, it was comedian Tina Fey, doing her impression of Palin, who said that on Saturday Night Live. That one made me laugh.

As I look back on a year’s corrections what strikes me is how minor the majority of the Star’s errors were in 2017. Sure, the Star got the location of the Royal York Hotel wrong that one time last spring and omitted the two medium yellow potatoes in a chana masala recipe but in the grand scheme of media mistakes, our year in corrections was for the most part, small potatoes.

That is not to say our minor mistakes don’t matter. Research into media errors and reader trust tell us these less significant errors do indeed have an impact on trust. But, being accountable for errors and transparent in correcting mistakes has a more significant impact on building reader trust.

As the Star’s journalistic standards have long stated, accuracy is our most basic contract with readers and correcting our mistakes is core to that contract. As this new year dawns, we pledge to continue to honour that contract and maintain your trust.

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